Thursday, January 5, 2012

DRAGON MY ASS

Among the loot brought to The Kid by Santa Claus this year is a Disney edition of the card game Uno. Your Humble Narrator suffered several ignominious defeats this past weekend.

Here’s the problem: Most of the cards feature one or another of the various Disney Princesses—Snow White, Belle, Jasmine—but occasionally one’s opponent plays…


Monster-of-the-Week: …a Dragon Card, depicting this week’s honoree, the dragon from 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. Confronted with this beast, one must discard, or draw from the deck until one finds, a card depicting a Princess in the clinch with her designated Prince, such cards being called “Dragonslayers.”

Now, this strikes me as suggesting to the young players that you need a man around for whatever dragon shows up in your life, that you’re powerless to pick up a sword & slay the freakin' dragon yourself. Doesn’t it? Or am I just being excruciatingly politically correct?

2 comments:

  1. i am with you, MVM. it is a prominent theme is disney's princess movies: use your sexuality/femininity to get a prince to take care of you because girls are not capable of taking care of themselves.

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  2. Definitely, but oddly enough just this morning The Kid & I watched Disney's "Enchanted" which seems to be a deliberate addrssing of this problem: at he end the Princess (Amy Adams) grabs the sword & rescues her comletely helpless true love (Patrick Dempsey)from the dragon. A self-conscious revision of the archetype, but it's a start...

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